The beautiful, naked, narled “thigh,” “leg,” and “foot” of a living, thriving Calimyrna fig tree that simply “is”
Footsteps of Nature: She Walks in Beauty
Nature is a constant celebration in honor of herself, and at every moment she invites every being to inherently join her celebration, from the smallest seed in the smallest berry to the tallest mountain and the farthest star. The one requisite of attendance: all must come as they are.
Much satisfaction in natural celebration is experienced by all beings, except human beings who have long used their exceptional powers of creation and reason to complicate the principles of evolution.
Human beings have intellectually rendered themselves incapable of being as they are; rather, they have evolved themselves into more that is actually less because the less with which they started, as individual naked babies and innocent children, is actually the more to their benefit. But the complexities of education and the fascinations of acculturation lead human beings to walk less in Nature’s beauty and more in the perversities of human nature.
Human beings hence fashion their own celebrations that are motivated by the dynamics of human nature rather than by Nature’s motiveless simplicity and honesty, and even those human beings who reject the indulgent dynamics of human nature seem nonetheless beholden to an image of rejection that is no less contrived or indulgent than the image of convention.
Who then can genuinely follow Nature’s footsteps in self-celebrating when so much of being human depends on a contrivance of self? And what then is beauty: a manmade standard in the eyes of its conditioned beholders or a natural existence that needs no beholders?
– Mary Jo Magar –